This is really cool - I think desktop tools, like native apps, CLIs, self-hosted tools, etc., have a lot of potential for innovation since they can be consumed by agents and the user can maintain more privacy, while also using their preferred agents and not being locked into a specific one.
Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it.
There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.
That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.
Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.
We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.
Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.
Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
Fair question. The short version is: the desktop app and CLI are free and always will be; optional cloud & AI services will cost money.
Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI.
We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products.
Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
- We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs)
- You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook
- You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it
- You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about
- We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work
- You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do)
- There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this)
- Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid.
You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
Can I use CLI to convert an .xlsx to PDF? What sort of pagination do you support? Can the page expand to contain the entire sheet? Can you split into physical pages given page size?
Yes, you can print an xlsx to PDF as excel would if you printed the same file (respecting whatever print layout has been done in excel). It'll be vectorized, so you have infinite resolution on zoom for text.
We do not yet support editing print layout, so you can't adjust the pagination / change the page size in / with Nobie yet, but that will come soon :)
Is this manipulating excel files using agent AI? How is this different from using a python package like openpyxl and adding a UI layer on top with agentic co-editing?
openpyxl is great at what it does, but it’s a file-format library rather than a workbook runtime.
It can insert columns, for example, but it doesn’t maintain dependencies such as formulas, tables, charts, or defined names when doing so. It also doesn’t evaluate formulas.
Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file.
Roughly speaking, Nobie is to an Excel workbook what V8 is to JavaScript. openpyxl is closer to a parser and serializer.
agents do a lot better when they can "run" the excel workbook and understand the impact of inputs, and how pixels look when layering on things like conditional formats.
I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI.
See https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free.
the interesting claim isn't "Excel for agents," it's determinism — a real spreadsheet runtime means the maths is reproducible instead of the model guessing at cell values token by token.
This is definitely giving of vibes like what Deno/Bun are to Nodejs, Nobie is to Excel. I wish there was a Windows version. Hopefully, this gives the Excel team reason to compete and improve their product like what happened to Nodejs.
The copy here says that your data is Local-only and that it can interface with Claude, Codex, or Gemini... are you running these models locally, or am I missing something?
via the CLI, you could probz stream values and formatting out of the sheet, although we probably need to add a few things to ensure you can reach into every nook and cranny of the xlsx file.
We an example on our site of how you might use git & nobie together.
I hope you try Nobie out. We've put a lot of effort into making sure its a great experience.
We're a native app, so you should expect a reasonable app size, 120fps, fast (correct) calcs, all the keyboard shortcuts from Excel, and a pretty UI.
If you're an LLM person, we ship a pretty good MCP, so you can just tell claude/codex to work on the file, and it'll open nobie and update it in front of you (if you use our embedded terminal, you get fancy hooks and context injection from the workbook to make the LLMs smarter, otherwise we have tools that provide some useful context to agents)
- We had a bet internally about how long it'd take for someone to complain about default number styles, we'll get this in by tomorrow
- CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
We fully support the formula language, and workbook semantics.
The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables. We support what-if scenario analysis, conditional formatting, cycles, lambdas, arrays, spills, lets, etc.
It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative- I never liked how Numbers handles filters, sorting, and views all different… all agentic AI stuff sound like a bonus to me
This is really cool - I think desktop tools, like native apps, CLIs, self-hosted tools, etc., have a lot of potential for innovation since they can be consumed by agents and the user can maintain more privacy, while also using their preferred agents and not being locked into a specific one.
Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it.
There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.
That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.
Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.
We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.
Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.
Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
What is the business model here? The website made think "sounds too good to be true"
Fair question. The short version is: the desktop app and CLI are free and always will be; optional cloud & AI services will cost money.
Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI.
We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products.
Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
Also, we've designed the product so it costs us zero dollars to run :)
having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't
Is this because your free customers bring their own ai/tokens?
Yeah, we're not providing subsidized AI to people. It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app
[delayed]
That was our goal :P
https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms
Some features I think are pretty cool:
- We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs)
- You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook
- You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it
- You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about
- We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work
- You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do)
- There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this)
- Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
Gave it a spin and it feels really polished!
Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid.
You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
Can I use CLI to convert an .xlsx to PDF? What sort of pagination do you support? Can the page expand to contain the entire sheet? Can you split into physical pages given page size?
Yes, you can print an xlsx to PDF as excel would if you printed the same file (respecting whatever print layout has been done in excel). It'll be vectorized, so you have infinite resolution on zoom for text.
We do not yet support editing print layout, so you can't adjust the pagination / change the page size in / with Nobie yet, but that will come soon :)
Is this manipulating excel files using agent AI? How is this different from using a python package like openpyxl and adding a UI layer on top with agentic co-editing?
https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/off...
openpyxl is great at what it does, but it’s a file-format library rather than a workbook runtime.
It can insert columns, for example, but it doesn’t maintain dependencies such as formulas, tables, charts, or defined names when doing so. It also doesn’t evaluate formulas.
Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file.
Roughly speaking, Nobie is to an Excel workbook what V8 is to JavaScript. openpyxl is closer to a parser and serializer.
agents do a lot better when they can "run" the excel workbook and understand the impact of inputs, and how pixels look when layering on things like conditional formats.
I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI.
See https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free.
Happy to answer any questions people have.
the interesting claim isn't "Excel for agents," it's determinism — a real spreadsheet runtime means the maths is reproducible instead of the model guessing at cell values token by token.
I'm not sure I follow, but the math in Nobie ties with the math in Excel.
When you use codex / claude in our built-in terminal, the agents get very high signal context about the workbook and what you're doing in it.
As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.
This is definitely giving of vibes like what Deno/Bun are to Nodejs, Nobie is to Excel. I wish there was a Windows version. Hopefully, this gives the Excel team reason to compete and improve their product like what happened to Nodejs.
Don't worry, windows is coming... :)
Looking forward to trying it out on windows, looks really interesting.
similar vibes, maybe less drama? lol
The copy here says that your data is Local-only and that it can interface with Claude, Codex, or Gemini... are you running these models locally, or am I missing something?
We're saying we don't take your data. If you choose to use codex or claude, and send your data to them yourself, that's your choice.
You don't need to use AI. We're fine if you just want a really good, free, spreadsheet tool :)
Very cool, well done. I’ll try it out! Is the calculation engine for the formulas tour custom, or is it built on top of eg Apache POI?
built from the ground up in rust, with the aim that it's much faster than Excel.
It supports all Excel formulas.
Everything is custom, it's been a lot of work :)
Tangential, but what's the art style of those images throughout the page? I really like them.
glad you like em :) we're going for a gritty, off-world museum vibes. Generated with midjourney.
I'd love to have a way to make xlsx files be git-compatible, i.e. stored in plaintext.
I realise this may be out-of-scope as it's kind of baked into the file format, but does Nobie offer any functionality in that direction?
via the CLI, you could probz stream values and formatting out of the sheet, although we probably need to add a few things to ensure you can reach into every nook and cranny of the xlsx file.
We an example on our site of how you might use git & nobie together.
Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?
CLI works on linux too. Windows CLI will be out this week.
The GUI already runs on linux, but we didn't want to muddy the launch page today. It will likely be out this week.
Very nice! Keen to try this out, been avoiding to add any MS to my new mac, and bumping into office files a few times a week sucks.
I hope you try Nobie out. We've put a lot of effort into making sure its a great experience.
We're a native app, so you should expect a reasonable app size, 120fps, fast (correct) calcs, all the keyboard shortcuts from Excel, and a pretty UI.
If you're an LLM person, we ship a pretty good MCP, so you can just tell claude/codex to work on the file, and it'll open nobie and update it in front of you (if you use our embedded terminal, you get fancy hooks and context injection from the workbook to make the LLMs smarter, otherwise we have tools that provide some useful context to agents)
Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests: - Ability to set european number style as standard - Ability to import/open csv
- We had a bet internally about how long it'd take for someone to complain about default number styles, we'll get this in by tomorrow
- CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
Can it handle dynamic array formulas and LET, LAMBDA etc?
Yep :)
We fully support the formula language, and workbook semantics.
The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables. We support what-if scenario analysis, conditional formatting, cycles, lambdas, arrays, spills, lets, etc.
It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative- I never liked how Numbers handles filters, sorting, and views all different… all agentic AI stuff sound like a bonus to me
We were tired of the Mac being a second class experience for working with spreadsheets (we're gonna be shipping this for all platforms soon though).
We're going to keep making this thing better and better until people look back on Excel wondering why people ever put up with it.
I hope you'll take Nobie for a spin, and give us whatever feedback comes to mind :)
Very cool. Excited to try this out sometime!
let us know your thoughts. we're shipping updates every day